What do you think?

I tend to think it is and will be. Also our energy crisis. The more I read the hard-care doomer predictions about the economy, about society as we know it the more skeptical I become (it's 2008 already and we're still chugging away, albeit w/ a recession to deal with).

But I still think carbon related issues will be the most challenging thing we've ever had to deal with. Especially for poorer countries. IMO, global climate change is a greater problem than peak oil and one that will exacerbate any resource scarcity problems we may encounter.

well, it certainly will open up a whole pandora's box of problems, some expected, but probably tons of unexpected ones, too.

GW will not force the human species into extinction, but the First World will either suffer badly, or have to change their ways (i.e. f*** the rest of the world even harder). The Second and Third World..... looks nasty, I'd say :(
Forget about the predictions, if they give details - too early to say. So far, we in the rich western countries have not been hit by the famines, the droughts, etc. We will be, one day, but that day can be kept far off - we just need to treat the others badly enough and take what we need.

No-one remember the threat of Global Thermonuclear Warfare? It was fairly recent...

Yes, I'd say nuclear war has the jump on you for this one.

Or the Toba eruption, which reduced humanity to a just about a thousand couples.

Global warming comes quite down the line compared to that.

Humanity is the greatest threat that humanity has ever had to face.

Of course not, and saying so is pure fearmongering.

As someone mentioned earlier, there was this one Ice Age or something (don't remember exactly) that reduced the human species to only a thousand or so. And there was the Cold War nuclear threat, and terrible plagues and such. And if you believe in Creationism there was the Global Flood.

Global Warming will hardly change anything in our society.

Global Warming will hardly change anything in our society.Actually there's a good chance that summer heatwaves will kill tens, or possibly hundreds of thousands of Europeans every year. So no it is not trivial.

Look up France in 2003: 14,000 deaths attributed to a heatwave IIRC, and such 'freak' events are likely to become almost annual occurences.

Whether you call it a threat depends very much on how you feel about the way things are going now.

Whether it is a threat or not depends on how much changing tempuratures impact agricultural output. Sci-fi writers had us by now off agriculture and less climate-dependent and more reliable methods of producing our food.
But depending on agriculture still, we are at the whim of the climate. Food production drops, people will starve. May not make us extinct, but having mass deaths does not sound fun to me.

No-one remember the threat of Global Thermonuclear Warfare? It was fairly recent...

I grew up in the 70's, in the middle east no less. Every time the Soviet Union or US sabre rattled, we got nervous...

In the last 10000 years definitly, but it is not a species threatening crises and unless it continues for another 100 years with no stopping CO2 it will not get that way.

Global Warming is in no way threatening the existence of humans on the planet. It threatens lifestyle and population density. Humans will be here, global warming or no, for many more thousands of years.

Let's not forget the importance of perspective: Even during the ice ages Africa; South Asia; and most of South America, southern North America, and southern Europe were NOT covered by ice sheets. And as I stated before, due to so much water being locked up in ice, sea levels were very much lower than they are today.

I think GW is very important to worry about.

But, if this is so important, why isn't this featured in CIV-IV? :sighs:

But, if this is so important, why isn't this featured in CIV-IV? :sighs:

It will be in Civ V though, no worries...

What do you think?
Sunuva--I can't believe I missed a Global Warming thread for FIVE DAYS.

I must be getting sloppy......

:eek: Oh--errrrr.....gee....Narz, didn't we just tell each other to piss off in that Colonialism thread??? This is certainly awkward. Married couple bumping into each other five minutes after getting divorced...... :D

(Of course, after that the question comes to mind of which of us is hubby and which is wife, but then the safe answer, since we're both guys, would be that it was a gay marriage) :lol:


:hatsoff: Okay, enough goofing around. To business.

Global warming may turn out to be a problem--or it may actually solve a few.....such as food shortages and an overdue Ice Age.

Global warming may turn out to be a problem--or it may actually solve a few.....such as food shortages and an overdue Ice Age.

It will cause more food shortages because of draught and floods than solve them by warming. We do already have all we need to combat an ice age.

Two corrections: it will cause some food shortages in some places, and improve food output in others. How much of which is unknown.

And no, we definitely do not have what we need to combat an Ice Age. In fact, we don't even know if the currently-overdue one has started yet!


Regarding #1: During past Ice Ages, the Earth had less habitable land, and less of that was farmable. Result: lower food output worldwide. When you carry the trend in the other direction, the result is obvious: higher food output.

Up to a point, of course. The kicker is that we don't know where that point is. And: no, dude, you don't know where that point is either. Neither do I, but then there's a reason why I used the phrase "may actually solve a few <problems>" in my post. That's a habit you might want to consider acquiring.


Regarding #2: No. We don't. It's just that simple. Aside from any other problems, the next Ice Age will cause both the quantity and quality of farmland worldwide to go down. When the ground turns into permafrost, there's nothing I know of that can be done.

We do need to combat an Ice Age, but the moderate amount of pre Industrial CO2 output was (by the graphs) enough to do it.

Maybe. That's yet another thing they're not sure of.

Correct, but the graphs do show what i said. We need probably only about 10% of our current out put to stop an ice age. Even if it is double that then we would still need to reduce human CO2 output by 80%, and the sooner the better.

I voted yes and then read thermonuclear war.

I don't vote in public polls. :)

I don't vote in public polls. :)
Why? What do you have to hide?

Global warming has helped humans in the past 10,000 years more than it has hurt them. Most of Europe used to be tundra.

I vote no, it's certainly a problem, but definitely not the "greatest" threat that humanity has ever had.

I don't vote in public polls. :)
Why? What do you have to hide?
It's a habit I made myself acquire so I wouldn't accidentally vote in anything embarrassing. Such as, say, a thread on S&M. People might start getting ideas, and then my PM box would fill up with messages from wierdos named "HungDaddy420" and all saying "Hi, I'm <X number of inches>, let's meet". :eek:

Two corrections: it will cause some food shortages in some places, and improve food output in others. How much of which is unknown.
And that's why we shouldn't let it out of control. If we wanted to do it, we could solve our food problems already.

And no, we definitely do not have what we need to combat an Ice Age. In fact, we don't even know if the currently-overdue one has started yet!
What we need: warmth, warmth and more warmth. That we can produce.

Regarding #1: During past Ice Ages, the Earth had less habitable land, and less of that was farmable. Result: lower food output worldwide. When you carry the trend in the other direction, the result is obvious: higher food output.
Regarding the number of pirates and the global mean temperature the result is obvious: lack of pirates causes global warming. The increase in farmland will be mostly in the overly rich and obese countries, while the poor developing world will suffer. Result: more inequality.

Up to a point, of course. The kicker is that we don't know where that point is. And: no, dude, you don't know where that point is either. Neither do I, but then there's a reason why I used the phrase "may actually solve a few <problems>" in my post. That's a habit you might want to consider acquiring.
Up to a point. But that point may as well be only one degree higher than the current temperature. So we should avoid warming because we don't know it yet.

Regarding #2: No. We don't. It's just that simple. Aside from any other problems, the next Ice Age will cause both the quantity and quality of farmland worldwide to go down. When the ground turns into permafrost, there's nothing I know of that can be done.
We can do a lot of things. We have nuclear power, we have geothermal energy, we have solar power. These can be used to warm us, and keep the ground from freezing in the areas where such risk exists. An ice age is far less of a threat than global warming, for now. We should stick to preventing global warming now, and if it appears that we need more CO2 to keep us from freezing then we'll do that later.
So do you have any reasons why we shouldn't cut our emissions?

Climate change could potentially be the greatest threat humanity has ever faced, which is why we have to control it early.

So do you have any reasons why we shouldn't cut our emissions?
Certainly. We could reduce them too far and make the planet too cold.

Yes it is the greatest threat. But not only to the humanity - but for the whole planet.

We're currently experiencing these over here:
- There's has been no snow or very little snow during this winter in the central Finland - something that has never happened before.
- The number of winters with no ice on the baltic sea has increased, and this is pretty bad thing for the baltic sea.
- Its winter and it's supposed to be cold outside. Well, it's not. We've had average temperature around -5C this time of the year. But currently it's somewhere around +3C. That can't be right. Pretty much same thing was with last winter, but we had some cold periods then. Now we haven't...

Crisises that were much worse than Global Warming:

Global Nuclear War
A Nazi Europe
Black Death / Bubonic Plague
That whole Dark Ages thing
Little Ice Age (only because unlike now, there were no heaters, so to speak)
Toba

I believe your belief that GW is the most pressing is because its the only crisis on a global scale you'v experienced, plus recency effects. Moral: learn history

Yes it is the greatest threat. But not only to the humanity - but for the whole planet.

George Carlin put it best.

The planet is fine. The people are four-letter-worded.

Crisises that were much worse than Global Warming:

Global Nuclear War
A Nazi Europe
Black Death / Bubonic Plague
That whole Dark Ages thing
Little Ice Age (only because unlike now, there were no heaters, so to speak)
Toba

Also rap music. :lol:

George Carlin put it best.

The planet is fine. The people are four-letter-worded.

True true, the planet has gone through much worse, CO2 levels have been nearly 10 times higher then they are right now.

It is a happy humanity we need to worry about.

I think well have to worry about sources of energy for our (capitalist) economy. As long as this is available, im sure a global upper class can survive somehow (why not on Mars if were talking of 10k years here)
UNLESS
theres a huge nuclear war before we diversify away from this planet (as stated above). But there is no way to make any predictions about that. (I ceased a stupid calculation because an extrapolation of 60 nuke years is not reasonable at all ;) )